Beverly Vance, the mother of the Ohio senator, welcomed his sister Lindsay into the world in 1979, when Beverly was 19 years old. Five ye...
Beverly Vance, the mother of the Ohio senator, welcomed his sister Lindsay into the world in 1979, when Beverly was 19 years old. Five years later, in 1984, she and Donald Bowman had JD.
But when JD was a little boy, his father left the house and left him with his mother to take care of him. Beverly had trouble with drugs and alcohol as JD grew up, and there were moments when she was said to have been harsh to her child. Finally, JD's grandparents, James and Bonnie Vance, took care of him. They are union Democrats, and he says they are responsible for how he turned out.
In his 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy, JD wrote about his childhood. Amy Adams played Beverly and Glenn Close played Bonnie in the movie version of the book.
He said in his victory speech after being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, "You're not always going to agree with every vote that I take, and you're not going to agree with every single amendment that I offer in the United States Senate, but I will never forget the woman who raised me."
JD will take the oath of office as President Donald Trump's vice president on January 20.
Here is everything you need to know about JD Vance's parents, from how they affected his childhood to what he has stated about being raised by his grandparents.
Beverly has a son and a daughter.
In 1979, Beverly welcomed JD's older sister, Lindsay. In 1984, she had JD, whose full name is James Donald Bowman. According to JD's memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, the siblings grew up in Middletown, Ohio, which is mostly made up of low-income people.
Many people in Middletown were concerned that JD's book made their town look like a hillbilly village. His cousin Bonnie Meiber wrote about this in her personal essay for the Journal-News in November 2020.
He told Meiber, "I don't blame Middletown for the problems in our family." "Some of the Middletown defensiveness comes from pride in their home. I'm proud of Middletown. I don't disagree with that feeling. But you need to understand that there are families who grow up below the poverty line because of things that happen outside of Middletown. A lot of people utilise drugs.
Donald left the family when JD was a little kid.
JD's parents formally split when he was 6 years old. His father had left the family a few years before that. In Hillbilly Elegy, he talks about how his mother told him about the breakup by saying he would never see his biological father again.
He said in his memoir, "It was the saddest I had ever felt." "Nothing was worse about my childhood than the constant change of father figures."
Beverly was a nurse who had trouble with drugs.
Beverly was a nurse, so she had access to prescription drugs, which she started to abuse. In his 2016 biography, the senator stated that Beverly had problems with drugs and alcohol while JD was growing up. This made things very difficult at home and often led to violence.
Beverly was arrested when JD was 12 years old, which scared him but also made him feel better.
He told Megyn Kelly in 2017, "At that moment, I just felt relieved and thought to myself, 'Alright, I'm going to live another day.'" "I just wanted that to be over, and then I lost it." I was terribly sad and alone since I was in the back of a police car and they had just arrested my mum. The relief of having lived through another day was gone, and I just wanted someone to come and get me.
Beverly had five husbands.
Beverly had a lot more relationships after breaking up with Donald, which meant that JD had a lot of different father figures. She ultimately married Bob Hamel, her third husband. He adopted JD and changed his name to James David Hamel, keeping the "JD" moniker by using her uncle's name instead of her ex-husband's.
JD writes in the biography, "This seemed like a stretch even when I was six." "Any old D name would have worked, as long as it wasn't Donald."
But Beverly and Hamel broke up, which meant that JD's name had to change again.
He stated, "Honestly, one of the worst parts was that Bob's leaving would make the already complicated web of last names in our family even more so."
When JD's grandparents became his guardians, he finally took his mother's last name, Vance.
After Beverly reportedly hurt JD, he was put in the care of his grandparents.
As Beverly's drug problems got worse, she is said to have become more abusive towards JD. In one scary event, he was in the car with his mother when she allegedly drove up to "what seemed like a hundred miles per hour and told me that she was going to crash the car and kill us both," he said in his memoir.
She finally slowed down so she could reach into the backseat to hit him, he said. He jumped out of the car and ran to a neighbor's house, where the police were called.
JD's grandparents took care of him in the end. He described them "without question or qualification, the best things that ever happened to me."
Donald came back into JD's life when he was a teen.
JD's father came back into his life for a short time when JD was a teenager. He didn't like the music JD liked, which included Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton.
JD writes in his memoir, "When we first got back in touch, he made it clear that he didn't like my taste in classic rock, especially Led Zeppelin." "He just told me to listen to Christian rock instead."
Later in life, JD became a fervent Catholic and was baptised in 2019 when he was 35 years old.